Three more examples of how government has lost its mind

Sometimes the federal government makes us a tiny bit nervous. Actually, sometimes the government seems completely bonkers.

By Ann McFeatters

recordnet.com

By Ann McFeatters

Posted Feb. 23, 2014 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 23, 2014 at 12:21 AM

By Ann McFeatters

Posted Feb. 23, 2014 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 23, 2014 at 12:21 AM

» Social News

Sometimes the federal government makes us a tiny bit nervous. Actually, sometimes the government seems completely bonkers.

The ever-more-powerful Department of Homeland Security, which is so huge they'd have to kill you if you knew how big it really is, has gotten into its head that it wants to hire a private company to track license plates to locate "wanted individuals."

This is so hare-brained on so many levels, we have to shudder. (Pause for some seriously significant shuddering.)

Second, this government is being rebuked around the globe for violating absolutely everyone's civil rights and collecting way too much information while letting contractors steal sacred passwords so more secrets can be leaked.

This government even listened in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone, for heaven's sakes, had to apologize and then complained bitterly when the Russians listened in on one of our diplomats.

Third, the ostensible reason for such an enormous privately maintained database - finding illegal immigrants and sending them back home - is nonsensical for an administration that is deporting more undocumented people than ever and can't even process the ones they find in a timely fashion. And this is an administration that says it wants to reform immigration laws so that the 11 million people already here without papers can stay, work and eventually gain citizenship.

Doesn't anyone in this administration ever read science fiction?

Don't they know that huge databases full of information inevitably will result in innocent people's lives being irreparably destroyed? "I was nowhere near Indiana when that bank was robbed. I was at home in Ohio sound asleep." Sure, you were. Prove it.

The license plate detection police have a picture of your car outside the bank.

Doesn't anyone in this administration watch TV? Every night on some cop show a commercial firm is stealing private information and using it for blackmail or terrorism or some other evil intent. According to The Washington Post, nobody in DHS has figured out yet how long the data would be kept, what would be a valid "investigative lead" to warrant checking the database and who exactly could check the license plate database to find someone's whereabouts.

Besides, if our government is so broke, how can we afford to pay a commercial outfit the hundreds of millions of dollars such a database collecting information on millions of law-abiding citizens would cost?

The government-is-daft argument No. two: A new study, by the always-conscientious Congressional Budget Office, finds that if impoverished Americans struggling to survive on $7.25 get a raise in the minimum wage so they can get out of poverty, 500,000 other Americans will lose their jobs. Just like that.

In other words, if you have a fast-food job and you make $7.25 an hour and you have to go on food stamps to feed your family, you can't get a nationally mandated raise to $10.10 an hour, as Obama proposes, because your friend Joe who works with you will lose his job. Employers who are making gazillions of bucks feeding people hamburgers will have to make up that $2.85 somehow so they will fire Joe and 499,999 others, give or take.

Whatever happened to The American Way of creating jobs to make items that fill the demand and putting money in the pockets of workers who can then afford to buy said items?

The government-is-nuts argument three: The United States has warned Ukraine's government to stop its violence against its citizens "or else." The U.S. also has warned Syria's government to stop its violence against its citizens "or else." Ditto Iraq and Afghanistan and North Korea and half the countries in Africa. Many people are beginning to ask, "Or else what?"

And all this in just one week, folks. And this is only February. And this is only 2014.